"Within three days of having the idea of wanting to do a service, we had a
HyperCard mock-up on the Mac with little Telecards and a server going that
actually sent the mail," says Andy. "Then we came up with one of our seminal
ideas - rubber stamps with semantics."

"You want things to be emotionally and visually appealing, not just
functional," says Bill. "Instead of raw text, you want some graphics to really
help make it appealing, but even the simplest graphics editor we could think of
has the problem that it takes time to draw - and an even worse problem that
most people can't draw something beautiful, something they love. They can
scribble, but they can't draw something attractive. The rubber stamps are an
outgrowth of those little stickers kids use. People can arbitrarily assign
properties to them - there are scripts inside them. For instance, the stamp
marked URGENT has a script that marks it as such."

"By the beginning of 1991, we came up with this idea of places in the
software," says Andy. "We didn't have (interface features such as the) hallway
or the Downtown street yet, but we had the idea of making each scene in the
software look like a physical place. We lived with that for a while, but it
still wasn't satisfying to us. We even had the concept of Downtown, but we
didn't have the framework of Downtown, where it scrolls as you walk by. Finally
in January of 1992, one of our engineers, Kevin Lynch, really had the seed
that instigated this idea, with the hallway of doors, and the street Downtown."

The interface has evolved to a geographical depiction of a portion of
cyberspace. (The graphics are by necessity very simple, since low-cost liquid
crystal screens cannot handle subtleties.) Those who have read Neal
Stephenson's Snow Crash will instantly see its relationship to the
"Metaverse" depicted therein - a virtual world where one can conduct all sorts
of transactions, gather objects, and, above all, maintain a sense of place. To
buy things, go Downtown and go into the electronic shopping mall. To scan
newspapers, go to the Newsstand. Eventually, the local pizza shop will show up
on your personal Main Street - go in, scan the menu, and place your order, hold
the anchovies.

And incidentally, the interface does not use handwriting recognition. You can
use a pen or your finger to draw or write on the screen, but digital text is
entered with a virtual keyboard - which, surprisingly, doesn't work too badly
for short messages. "Actually," says Bill, "we spent a lot of time trying to
make it so you type less, because we don't think that the typing is very good."

Some critics will undoubtedly complain that the system looks more like a
graphic Adventure game than a platform for conducting business. A toy, not a
tool. But then, they said that about the Mac, too. And now even hard-core suits
diddle their mouses and trip through icon space. Likewise, I think that the
Magic approach will scale nicely as the market for hand-held out-of-body
experiences grows. (It would be nice, though, to have more shortcuts built in
for adept users - sort of a "beam me up, Scotty" button that intuits where
you want to go at any point.)

The Telescript Solution

Early in the development of the interface, though, the Magic people discovered
that a crucial piece of the puzzle was missing. In order to realize its vision,
General Magic had to pay more attention to the underlying protocols of
communications technology - a black art that no one on board had really
mastered. They required an entirely new way of processing messages.
Fortunately, they came across Jim White, a legendary telecom programmer who,
independently, had been thinking of a solution.

White, the wizard who had developed the standard x.400 networking protocol,
envisioned a network which was not merely a pipeline for messages, but a
platform of its own - a seething system where every message was literally a
computer program that executed itself as it went out on the Net. Each message
would be a software agent, a sort of digital servant performing a task for the
person who sent it out. Sounds scary, and actually it is. But if you could
control the agents you'd have something terrifically powerful.

"At that time (1990), we weren't thinking in terms of agents, we weren't
thinking in terms of making the network into a platform," says Bill. "When Jim
first brought up agents, I had in my mind knowledge-navigator types
anthropomorphic, obsequious little sci-fi agents. But then I realized that he
wasn't talking about these human personalities so much as traveling programs
that can take my will with
them."